Cake Is Good Food

I have an obsession with cake. I like to make cake, and I like to eat cake. This past weekend I attended a shower at which there was cake. Right about when I was ready to have my slice, someone put a notebook in my hand and said, "Could you please record all the gifts?" There were so many gifts that I absolutely could not stop for one minute to get cake, and by the time my job was done, the cake was gone. That was so wrong.

The problem with cake is that it so often looks amazing but is actually kind of disappointing. (Thinking like that helps me to cope with cake losses like my most recent one.) This cake, however, will not disappoint. I cut it into slices for transporting purposes, and also because I could snag a few slices for my family before I took it to whatever event I was taking it to.

Triple Chocolate Cake

1 box of devil's food cake mix
4-1/2 oz. package of instant chocolate pudding mix
1-3/4 cup milk
12-oz. pkg. semi-sweet chocolate chips
2 eggs
powdered sugar for the top

Preheat oven to 350. Combine everything except the powdered sugar in a bowl. Mix by hand until well blended. Pour into a greased and floured Bundt pan. Bake at 350 for 50-55 minutes or until it springs back. Cool and then turn out onto serving plate and spring powdered sugar on top.

I made this apple cider cake (above) a few weeks ago when Jesse was home from college. He and his friends actually devoured the entire cake in one night. I did get enough to say that it was, indeed, delicious. I used the recipe here at Eat at Home.

Laurel practiced her cake-decorating skills on this mocha cake. I found this recipe at Life in Grace, and it is truly delicious. Kind of a lot of work to get all those little swirlies on top, but hopefully you have a youngster who enjoys doing such things. I'm more of a gimme-a-knife kind of icing girl.

I have a bunch more cake recipes bookmarked that I want to try. The problem is that I rarely make cakes just to eat at home; I need an event in order to make a cake. The obvious reason for this is that I, like many mothers, will end up eating at least half of the cake if I make it for my family. (Unless Jesse is home from college. I can always depend on him to eat half a cake. But he is 6'1" and weighs like 75 lbs, so he can afford to eat half a cake.)

Here are some more on my list:
Darn Good Chocolate Cake Drizzled in White Chocolate at Simply Sweet Home
Cranberry Cake with Warm Vanilla Butter Sauce at Make It and Love It
Tres Leches Cake at Pioneer Woman
Molten Chocolate Lava Cake at Pioneer Woman

Do you have a cake recipe I need to try? Tell me, please!

Linked up at Tasty Tuesdays

Homeschool Blog Awards

Well, this is exciting! I went over to the Homeschool Blog Awards today to vote for The Homeschool Classroom and Simple Homeschool, two blogs that I write for, and found that I was nominated in not one, not two, but four categories: Best Homeschool Mom, Best Encourager, Best Photos and Artistic Content, and Best Homemaking Blog (that one kinda makes me chuckle!). How exciting to get to put this little button on my blog!

If you click on it, you can go over and vote for me or for any other of the wonderful blogs listed there. And thank you so much to whoever nominated me!

Saturday Morning

I like how Margaret at Two Kid Schoolhouse did her Saturday Morning Journal, so I'm copying.

What I want to do today:
• Stay in my pajamas
• Read (currently, When My Name Was Keoko)
• Eat cake, hot buttered popcorn, and fettuccine alfredo
• Play Upwards and other games that only I seem to like
• Buy lots of new clothes with magical money
• Go to the library

What I need to do today:
• Mail a package to Jesse in the next 50 minutes before the post office closes
• Buy a gift for and attend a shower for a family at our church whose house burned down last month
• Work on lesson plans
• Fold clothes
• Make a dent in the ironing
• Sort and organize the evil stacks of paperwork and mail on the kitchen counters
• Catch up on emails and other things I'm avoiding or forgetting

My goal: to make time for some of the top list while accomplishing most of the bottom list.

What's happening on your Saturday?

Linked up on Two Kid Schoolhouse

Weekly Wrap-Up (in Photos)

Missing photos: Monday's co-op. Duncan's tongue-clipping. Packing Operation Christmas Child boxes at AHG. Dr. H. and Laurel blowing their noses and hacking.

Linked up with the Weekly Wrap-Up at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers

In the Yard: November

Yesterday Duncan and I strolled around our yard for one last dose of that wonderful mix of summer and autumn. You know, the days when the summer flowers are still blooming, peeking through the leaves…

Those crazy roses are blooming like it's June, and the lantanas are just now at their most beautiful. Throw in some patches of salvia, marigolds, Black-eyes Susans, four o'clocks, mums, and even some straggly impatiens, and we have a crazy quilt of mixed seasons.

The cat watched us from his favorite bench. He's extremely lazy.

Duncan took his new remote-control car out for a test drive through the leaves…



Today is cold and rainy. By tomorrow, the leaves will be mostly on the ground and our first real dose of cold weather will hit. Suddenly, summer and fall are really gone.

I guess I'll have to take down the pumpkin lanterns. I could be really proactive and throw away the real pumpkins before they rot.

But then Dr. H. would miss all the fun of scraping pumpkin goo off the porch.

Linked up with Outdoor Wednesday and Just for the Joy of It

Common Cold Cures

Both Randy and my Dad are already battling terrible colds this year, hacking coughs and dripping noses. Pure cold misery. Last week I made chicken tortilla soup for my Dad, and I swear he was better within a couple of days. Tonight I'm making French onion soup for Randy, and I'm expecting him to be back to normal by tomorrow or so.

Chicken Tortilla Soup

2 TB. vegetable oil
1 medium onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 chipotle pepper in adobo sauce, minced, plus a tsp. of the liquid
1/2 to 1 TB. chili powder (the more, the hotter)
2 tsp. salt
8 cups chicken broth
1 cup corn (frozen or canned)
1-2 cups cooked and shredded chicken
1/8 cup lime juice
tortilla chips

If you don't have a store of cooked chicken breasts in your freezer, you'll need to cook about 2 chicken breasts before starting this. You can boil them for 20 minutes or grill them. A rotisserie chicken also works great for this.
Sauté the onion, garlic, chipotle, chili powder, and salt in oil for about 5 minutes. Add the chicken broth, bring to boil, reduce heat slightly, and simmer uncovered for 10 minutes. Add the corn and cook 5 minutes more. Stir in chicken and lime juice and warm through, for about 15 more minutes.

Ladle into bowls and pass the tortilla chips to crumble on top of the soup.



French Onion Soup
Serves 4

2 TBS. butter
4 large yellow onions, sliced thin
1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. mustard
dash of thyme or Italian seasoning
6 cups water
3 TBS. soy sauce
2-3 TBS. dry white wine or red wine (opt.)
few dashes of pepper
******************
Croutons (recipe below)
Grated Mozzerella or thin slices of provolone or swiss cheese

1. Melt butter in a kettle or Dutch oven. Add onions and salt. Cook over medium about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.
2. Add mustard and thyme. Cover. Continue to cook very slowly for about 35 minutes. The onions will be so soft and will simmer in their own liquid.
3. Add everything else except the toppings. Simmer 15 minutes more. Dish into overproof bowls and top with croutons* and cheese (in that order). Put under broiler briefly to brown the cheese. Serve with smoked turkey sandwiches or just crusty bread.

*Croutons
Cube some old hoagies, hamburger buns, stale bread, or whatever you have handy. Saute in garlic butter and then toast at 300 for a few minutes.

Seriously—this stuff is good for colds. Try making one of these next time someone in your house needs his stuffy nose and sore throat cleared up! Do you have a cure-all soup?

Linked up with Tasty Tuesday

On the Menu

I am ashamed to say it's been nearly a month since my last On the Menu entry. We've been on the El Cheapo Menu Plan for the past few weeks, AKA Life with College Tuition. It seems too short of a time ago that we were paying our own graduate school tuition, and here we are again. (It was only a decade ago, after all!)

Anyway, my mealing planning mostly involved eating out of the pantry and freezer for the last few weeks, but with a paycheck comes groceries. But before I post this week's recipes, I wanted to review a couple from my last menu post. We tried two new recipes from Pioneer Woman: Chicken with Olives and Pasta with Tomato-Blue Cheese Sauce. The first one was completely unexciting and won't be making my On the Menu list. But the Pasta with Tomato-Blue Cheese Sauce was fabulous! I get kind of drooly even thinking about it.

Here's what we'll be eating this week at SmallWorld:

Baked Teriyaki Chicken
Broccoli Cheddar Soup
French Onion Soup with Turkey Sandwiches
Corn and Bacon Chowder
Hamburgers
Country Fried Steak

I'll be checking out Menu Plan Monday and Tasty Tuesday this week, and of course I always see what's happening with Pioneer Woman. I love adding new recipes to my "Recipes to Try" file. Latest ones include, besides all of the above except the French onion soup: Pumpkin Scones and Swirled Pumpkin Yeast Bread. I also made some yummy cakes recently. One of these days I'll get around to posting the recipes!

Linked up with Menu Plan Monday and Tasty Tuesday

Weekly Wrap-Up

We have settled into a comfortable rhythm thus far. I am quite sure that, in 11 years of homeschooling, we've never followed such a predictable schedule as we are this year. It wasn't really intentional, but we are all enjoying our days, knowing "what's next."

Ten weeks into the year, I can say with absolute assurance that taking a year away from our regular Sonlight studies was the right thing to do. We are all loving going through the Chronicles of Narnia, and I know this is a year they will cherish. I think, in my heart of hearts, that perhaps my main goal of this year was to instill in them the kind of love for the Narnia books that I've carried with me my whole life.

Here's what's been happening this week:

Monday: Co-op classes and Moms' Night Out. I enjoyed and very much needed a night out with just moms. In both my literature circle class and my creative writing class, I'm having the kids work together in groups for a project.In literature circle, the groups had to write a poem with a specific character and mood (drawn from a basket) and then get to choose everything else (rhythm and/or rhyme scheme, setting, theme, etc.). In creative writing, they are working in groups on advertising a certain project with a certain advertising technique. I look forward to seeing what they come up with at our next class.

Real life snapshot: notice Duncan's Sharpie tattoos
and the pencil he has sharpened down to a nub.

Tuesday:
All the regular things (math, spelling, grammar, essay writing, handwriting). We began reading Prince Caspian. The kids kept saying, "That wasn't in the movie!" Yep.
In the afternoon we had a consultation with an ENT for Duncan. We've always known that he is tongue-tied, as his brother and father are. (Both of my boys are in the "we don't clip tongues" generation. Nowadays, pediatricians are again clipping anchored tongues.) But by the time Jesse was Duncan's age, his tongue seemed to have loosened and he was able to pronounce his "R" and "L" sounds fine. A speech therapist evaluated Duncan several weeks ago and said that she'd rarely seen a tongue as anchored as his. We decided to go ahead and see an ENT and made an appointment to get his tongue clipped next Tuesday! I expect he'll have a year of speech therapy coming up as he learns to retrain his tongue.

Wednesday-Friday:
All the regular things. We are halfway through Prince Caspian now, so we're right about on schedule. My plan is to finish Voyage of the Dawn Treader by Thanksgiving, just in time for the movie to come out. We'll take December then to break from Narnia reading and indulge in a good Christmas book. I'm not sure yet what that will be.

We also had American Heritage Girls and Cub Scouts this week, which takes up most of our Thursday. Duncan is on a Cub Scout camporee this weekend, and Laurel worked for four hours last night doing childcare during a funeral.


This was a quiet week, with the leaves changing and the temperature truly getting cooler. The leaves are really falling, and Duncan says, "Poor Daddy. Look at all the raking he'll have to do." He seems to have forgotten his job as Daddy's raking partner.

The kids are getting a good dose of life lessons this week in addition to bookwork. Our church lost a sweet man this week to cancer. He was only diagnosed a couple of weeks ago, and his death at age 51 has everyone reeling. Laurel's servant heart was a blessing to so many people last night as she and another girl took care of a dozen kids so their parents could attend the funeral.

One of our cats has also gone MIA this week. This is the kitty that the kids spoil rotten, wrapping him in blankets and calling him "baby." As the days go by, we lose a little hope that he will come home, but they seem to be dealing with his loss well. We've always taken the attitude that animals come and go, especially indoor/outdoor cats, fish, hermit crabs, gerbils, etc. They've had lots of such pets through the years, and they seem to be pretty accepting of the cycle of life.

Linked up with Weekly Wrap-Up

Wordless Wednesday: Soup and Pumpkins

It's our one big party of the year: 50+ friends, crockpots full of soup, BB gun contests, kids running around in the dark, parents relaxing, Guitar Hero, candy, and of course pumpkin carving. It's the one I hope our kids and their friends will reminisce about when they are grown. Maybe they'll carry on the tradition, or maybe they'll still come and bring the next generation.

Linked up on Parenting by Dummies, 5 Minutes for Mom, and Wordless Wednesday

October Morning

I caught a small slice of perfection this morning as I took the dog out. The wind is strong here and gusty, which is unusual, and quite warm for an October morning. The mountains were clear and the leaves seemed to have peaked overnight, in spite of the warmth. Red so bright I couldn't look away. The moon, just past full, was above our house, and the sun just coming up over the mountains.

I sat outside on a bench with my coffee and watched the leaves, and breathed.

Yesterday was cluttered with contention and bickering. Seems like everywhere I turned, someone was being mean or melting down or abdicating responsibility. So many undercurrents of discord and deceit. We exhaust ourselves with temporal things.

Still, there were glimpses of good things yesterday. Laughter with friends. Friends, period. My mother in her light blue gardening hat. My brave daughter. A compliment about my son. Twenty minutes before bed to talk with my husband, to rehash the day. It wasn't a bad day, but I was happy to sleep, knowing that with sleep comes the gift of a new day.

Today: bathed already in warmth and an unearthly glow, a glimpse, an opening of sky, wind in the trees, flurry of leaves. Rejoicing does, indeed, come in the morning.

Linked up with Tuesdays Unwrapped